Tired doesn't feel like tired

"I have challenges with my team. The event I'm organising is not going to plan. And my boss doesn't understand what I'm trying to do…"

One of the participants in my leadership program was walking me through everything going wrong when I stopped him.

Before we get into the hard leadership challenges, I almost always ask four basic questions: When does your energy rise and fall? How is your focus? How do you manage your time? How do you keep track of everything you need to do?

I know. Basics. That's exactly why I ask.

If your energy is depleted and your attention is scattered, most of what I can teach you about leadership or navigating uncertainty never comes online when you need it. It's like installing new apps on a phone with 3% battery.

In his case, a few more questions revealed something more fundamental than his team problem: he was sleeping terribly.

So that's where we started. A few habit changes later, his sleep improved, and he felt the difference immediately—at work and at home.

I've seen this again and again. Especially when people transition into bigger or new leadership roles, their instinct is to learn more: strategy, communication, delegation, decision-making. Sometimes, though, the highest-impact change is much more basic.

September is a transition month. Work accelerates, school starts, new projects appear. So over the next few weeks, we'll work on four baseline habits to help you through this busy month: energy, focus, time, and priorities.

And energy is the logical place to start, because everything else—focus, judgment, patience, presence—depends on having enough of it 👇

Uncertainty is expensive

Leadership is about meeting uncertainty with agency. But uncertainty demands capacity: more decisions, more ambiguity, more emotions to manage, more things competing for attention.

And depletion can look suspiciously like a leadership problem. You become more reactive and less patient. You interrupt. You stop asking and start telling because telling is easier. Your team notices.

So before trying to fix every leadership behaviour, sometimes it's worth checking the battery.

Time is the pot — energy is the heat

People often ask how I get a lot done without working 100 hours a week. One answer is: I don't only manage time. I manage energy.

You know the difference between one hour when your brain is sharp and four hours when you're all over the place. Same person, same calendar, very different output.

When we fall behind, we usually add hours. I try to improve the quality of the hours I already have.

Here are five things that have made the biggest difference for me:

😴 Sleep

I go to bed around 10 pm and wake up early (5–6) because morning is my prime time. I want my best brain available for my hardest work. (Do you know what your prime time is? Worth knowing and protecting that time for the most important work.)

I also keep roughly the same wake-up time, including weekends. Interestingly, a study following more than 60,000 people found that sleep regularity predicted mortality risk more strongly than sleep duration. How consistently you sleep may matter more than most of us realise.

My room is dark and cold, and I try to finish eating about three hours before bed. Because I take stimulant medication for ADHD, I pay particular attention to winding down; magnesium glycinate and L-theanine are also part of my own routine. That's personal rather than a prescription for everyone.

But here is the sleep finding I find most useful. In a classic experiment, people limited to six hours of sleep a night became progressively worse on attention tests over two weeks. Their performance kept deteriorating, but their feeling of sleepiness didn't deteriorate nearly as much.

In other words, you can get used to being sleep-deprived without your brain getting used to it.

That's the dangerous part. You can be impaired and start calling it normal.

🥗 Food

A few days a week I fast for 14–17 hours (intermittent fasting). I've done it for years because I find my energy more stable that way.

I wouldn't tell you fasting automatically makes your brain sharper. The human evidence on fasting and cognition is still mixed. But here is something I find more interesting.

We call it the "post-lunch dip." Except experiments have found that the afternoon dip in alertness can happen even when people don't eat lunch. Part of it appears to be built into our daily biological rhythm.

Food can make the dip better or worse for me, but lunch isn't necessarily the whole explanation.

The lesson I take from this is simpler: pay attention to your own data. What happens after a large meal? When you fast? When you eat earlier or later? When you switch to more protein and less carbs?

Experiment instead of adopting somebody else's perfect diet.

☕ Caffeine

I usually don't drink coffee during my first hour awake. This allows your natural waking mechanisms to kick in, before you disrupt it with coffee. I have two cups a day and move a cup of green tea in the afternoon.

And dose matters more than people realise. In a recent controlled experiment, 100mg of caffeine didn't significantly affect sleep even four hours before bed. But a large 400mg dose altered sleep even when taken 12 hours before bed, including reducing deep sleep.

Even more interesting: people weren't always good at noticing the damage themselves.

So caffeine can create a beautiful little trap:

Poor sleep → more caffeine → poorer sleep → more caffeine.

And you blame the workload.

🚶 Movement

I exercise for about 15 minutes every morning and play tennis two or three times a week. At work, I use a standing desk and have a reminder to move and stretch.

But I learned something interesting here too: standing isn't really the point. Moving is.

In one experiment with desk workers, sitting for four hours reduced cerebral blood flow. Taking a two-minute walk every 30 minutes prevented the decline. Interestingly, one longer eight-minute walk every two hours didn't clearly do the same.

Small and frequent beat big and occasional.

So when my energy drops, I no longer automatically tell myself, Come on. Focus. Often I get up and walk outside instead.

Because one of the strangest things about exercise is this:

Spending energy can give you energy.

Across dozens of controlled studies, regular exercise reduced fatigue and increased people's reported energy and vitality.

🧘 Recovery

On days with back-to-back meetings, I often find time to do 15 minutes of Yoga Nidra: lie down, eyes closed, guided practice.

I think of it as a reset. The research on Yoga Nidra is promising but still developing, so I don't need a dramatic neuroscience claim to justify it. I use it because I notice the difference.

The bigger lesson matters more: recovery is part of work.

We treat breaks as a reward we earn after the work is finished. But the work is never finished.

Sometimes 15 minutes of stopping improves the next two hours more than 15 additional minutes of pushing.

Your body can handle a hard day. It struggles with hard days that never end.

The energy you don't have to manufacture

Eventually I realised that energy management goes beyond sleep, caffeine and exercise.

My favourite source of energy is the right people and the right work.

Some projects leave me tired but excited. Others just leave me depleted. Some conversations give me three new ideas. Others require recovery.

A big reason I built my own business was to have more choice over both.

I know that choice isn't available to everyone today. It wasn't available to me for much of my career either. But you can start noticing now.

Alongside "Am I good at this?" and "Will this advance my career?", add another question:

What happens to my energy when I do this?

You may not be able to redesign your life tomorrow. But you can start designing toward it today.

✨ The adventure of the week

Start where I start with participants.

For the next five days, notice when your energy rises and falls. Then look at your biggest recurring dip and ask: What is the most likely baseline habit behind it?

Sleep? Food? Caffeine? Movement? Recovery?

Pick one. Not five.

Maybe it's going to bed by 10. Moving your last coffee earlier. Taking a ten-minute walk at 3pm. Not eating right before bed.

Then make it easier to do. Give it a trigger: "After I pour my morning coffee…" Make the action small enough for a bad day: "…I walk for five minutes." Remove one piece of friction: shoes by the door.

Run the experiment for seven days. Then check your energy again.

Next week we will talk about Focus. How to protect your most important mental ability in a world where your attention is a commodity. As someone with ADHD, I've had to learn this one the hard way.

Until next time, keep evolving ✊

Nikola